BHUNGROO WINS THE 2017 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE
Wednesday, 11 October 2017 NEW YORK CITY (October 11, 2017) - The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Challenge: Bhungroo, a project of the Sustainable Green Initiative Forum (SGIF) in Gujarat State, India. The project was submitted by Trupti Jain and Biplab Ketan Paul, 'SGIF’s' co-founders. Bhungroo (meaning “straw” or “hollow pipe” in Gujarati) has developed a deceptively simple, “low-tech” but highly innovative technology that can filter, inject, and store water from precipitation in the water table up to a depth of 300 meters in the subsoil. The project uses this novel technology to dramatic benefit for poor farmers in a multi-dimensional strategy that boosts crop yields and food security, raises rural incomes, improves soil fertility, combats the effects of climate change, and radically enhances the wellbeing and social status of women. The Fuller Challenge Review Committee found Bhungroo to be a perfect demonstration of one of Buckminster Fuller’s favorite dictums: "If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” Bhungroo’s water storage system occupies a very small footprint. Using only 1 square meter of surface area to drill, it allows multiple farmers to collectively preserve and retrieve up to 40 million liters of stored rainwater. This is game changing in tropical and equatorial regions where monsoon seasons alternate with very dry periods and droughts, a situation compounded by the further instability brought by climate change. While simple to implement and operate, this water storage method is highly sophisticated and is based on a deep understanding of climatic, hydrological, and geological factors. Bhungroo uses 17 technical designs that weigh 27 variables to find the ideal locations and depths at which to store water. In addition to alleviating hunger and poverty and enhancing food security, SGIF, which combines social enterprise with non-profit components, is strongly focused on boosting the income and status of women farmers and of others at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid because of religion, caste, or ethnicity in the often rigidly patriarchal rural regions where they work. SGIF achieves this by training groups of women farmers to form entrepreneurial collectives that run, own, and operate the water storage systems. The organization provides them with access to larger social networks and ongoing training and support. They are also developing pictorial educational apps that will permit illiterate farmers to master the technology. “While as a technological artifact, Bhungroo is scaled down as much as possible, the scale of its vision itself is global,” said Melissa Kelly, sustainability analyst and member of the Fuller Challenge Review Committee. “And in its social enterprise elements, it also offers a fundamental challenge to existing social systems. The solution anticipates many critical future issues: women’s empowerment, food security, poverty alleviation, and how to become resilient in the face of rainfall patterns that will become even more erratic as the climate changes further.” Bhungroo’s model, which has proven to be very successful in Gujarat, is expanding to other parts of India. The SGIF team is also consulting with groups in Bangladesh, Ghana, Togo, and Vietnam that are seeking to adapt Bhungroo for their agrarian communities. This deceptively simple but revolutionary approach, which allows smallholder farmers to survive and thrive in the face of drought, monsoon flooding, and ever more erratic precipitation patterns, simultaneously empowers women and the poorest of the poor. It is clearly a “trimtab,” to use Fuller’s term, that can improve life for millions of the world’s most disenfranchised people. Climate change’s most severe impacts often fall on rural communities in developing countries hampered by financial, infrastructural, and other constraints. Globally, 260 million farmers are adversely affected by too much or too little water—floods, erratic rain, and droughts. In India alone, 6.72 million hectares of land are affected by this instability, dramatically contributing to food-insecurity and oppressive indebtedness for the poorest rural dwellers. Many irrigation solutions are not affordable and difficult to access. Aside from short-term losses of crops, the cycle of flood and drought typical of monsoon regions damages soil fertility in the long-term, leading to a vicious cycle of indebtedness and ecological degradation. Rural women farmers suffer most acutely as a result of these hardships. In many cases, women do the majority of agricultural work, but they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy and are considered laborers rather than farmers, as men still own the land, control women’s labor, and make important agricultural decisions due to patriarchal social systems that dominate rural life nearly everywhere. In the absence of independent resources, women are far more vulnerable to poverty and destitution in cases of desertion, divorce, or the death of their husbands. Even for widows who become smallholders, irrigation scarcity and the effects of recurring disasters make it difficult to profitably cultivate the land that they are left with. In many cases, local power groups take advantage of these women’s vulnerabilities and capture their lands by manipulating their financial indebtedness. The Sustainable Green Initiative Forum has designed Bhungroo (in Gujarati, “straw” or “hollow pipe”), an innovative technology that can filter, inject, and store storm water up to a depth of 300 meters in the subsoil. Operating in the Gujarat state of India with consultancy-based projects in Bangladesh, Ghana, Togo, and Vietnam, Bhungroo has 17 technical designs for water management in a variety of soil types and agro-climatic zones that can be customized based on 27 variables. Using only 1 square meter of surface area, Bhungroo allows multiple farmers to collectively preserve and retrieve stored rainwater. In an area where female farmers are often disregarded as contributing members of society, this exemplary social enterprise also has a non-profit component that trains women who are smallholder farmers to collectively own the subsoil water stored by Bhungroo and to provide fee-based services to other smallholder farmers in their village, confronting repressive social structures that have dominated the region for 400 years. Their program will be made available to illiterate farmers through the development of an app that utilizes a pictorial format. Through the provision of a simple yet elegant, trimtab-like technology, Bhungroo can equip smallholder farmers to be able to face drought, monsoon flooding, and unpredictable precipitation patterns related to climate change while simultaneously empowering women and the poorest of the poor. For more information, please visit the SGIF website: http://www.sgifgoon.org/ "If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking." –R. Buckminster Fuller From the Buckminster Fuller Institute Website